June 2, 2001
Winning Team - South Carolina Gamecocks
Head Coach Ray Tanner
Opening Statement: It would be an understatement to say that I am delighted that we are playing in the third game. After the thrashing yesterday to come back and win a nail-biter today is a tremendous effort. I'm so proud of my players, their character. Certainly experience and being a veteran team helped us today. We rolled two big double plays to get out of jams and we get to play a third day.
Q. The talk all year has been about getting the oppourtunity to play for the CWS, how does it feel now that you're here?
A. It feels great. Certainly there is work to be done, but we have an opportunity and that's what we've been shooting for all year to get back in the same environment we were in last year, and that's one win to go to Omaha. There are so many teams that do not get this opportunity. We worked hard to get to this situation and hopefully tomorrow we can have one of our better games of the year.
Tim Whitaker (Player)
Q. Was there a switch in momentum when you got your hit in the fifth inning?
A. I was just trying to get a pitch to hit, and he eas smaking some great pitches on me. I was just trying to foul off what I could and he left a changeup over hte plate and I luckily stuck my bat out and it went over the second baseman's head. I think we did [feel a switch in momentum then], our bats started going after that and our pitching jsut stepped up after we got a couple of runs.
Losing Team - Stanford Cardinal
Head Coach Mark Marquess
Opening Statement: It was a great game, unfortunately we came out on the short end, but I thought South Carolina earned it. I think the difference in the game was they bunched their hits and when they had an opporunity with runners on base they came up with a big hit. On the flip- side when we had guys on base we didn't come up with the big hit - they made the big pitch, we didn't make the big pitch. We had some good pitching and great defense, I thought we hit the ball pretty well, we just didn't back them up.They deserved to win, they played better than we did and hopefully we can bounce back and get a win tomorrow.
Q: Was it just misfortune today with the bad hits, even though they were hit hard?
A: That's the nature of the game, that happens and you have to overcome that and we had chances. We hit some balls hard, but we also had a chance to get some hits and we didn't. That's the way it goes, sometimes you get the borderline call you get the bad hop, unfortunately it didn't happen that way for us today. But South Carolina made it happen, they did a great job today.
Mike Gosling (Player)
Q: You had a good first four innings, what happened?
A: It was frustrating, I felt good the first four innings - giving up no hits - but I came up in the fifth and I gave up four straight. That's been my Achilles' Heel lately - not being able to stop the big inning. But I have to give them credit because they really adjusted to me the second time through the lineup. I just needed to come up with a bid pitch in a few of those spots and they strung four in a row on me.